The 6-7 Generation: A Teacher's Report from the Front Lines

A teacher's report from the front lines of the 6-7 generation, where nobody can read a clock, and everybody thinks talking back counts as an argument.

My follow-up on TikTok, after the original was taken down. Watch on TikTok

The other day I was scrolling TikTok and landed on a video of teenagers, seventeen, eighteen years old, telling people in their forties and fifties exactly how dumb they are. The gist: you didn't grow up with AI, the world is far more complicated now than it ever was in your day, and you just don't get it.

Pert. Mouthy. Very, very sure of themselves.

I couldn't find that exact clip again (the algorithm giveth, and the algorithm taketh away), but here's its first cousin. Two teenagers, one wall clock, one simple question: what time is it?

Video: @vivianthemicgirl on TikTok

Here's the thing: they're half right

The truth between left and right usually sits somewhere down the middle. Left and right are two wings of the same bird, and divide-and-conquer is how it flies. The feet of that bird are what step on every one of us.

So yes, the world is harder now. I'll even hand the kids some proof.

My baby-boomer parents still believe I can get a job washing dishes, pull myself up by my bootstraps and work hard "the way they did." This is after I was pushed out of Taiwan by a stalker working hand in glove with a landlord, and a court system that was turned against me for four long years. Fifteen years of building a school, gone. No pity and no mercy from my own family. I wasn't a son in trouble. I was a problem to be managed. If you ever need a picture of "adding insult to injury," there it is.

Meanwhile, I was crying for help from anyone and everyone, death-by-a-thousand-cuts style, with COVID on top. I went to the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei, Canada's de facto embassy, more than once. When I finally asked Ottawa for my own file, it came back 551 pages long. The office in Taipei did pass something along. Read what Canada did, and did not do.

Then I came home to New Brunswick, a province that says it can't find teachers, and sent off application after application to a door that turned out to be painted on the wall. And now try crossing into Trump's America without a full-time job or a house in Canada to prove your "significant ties."

So no, kids. I'm not going to tell you it was harder in my day. Some of it is genuinely worse now.

But.

Why "the 6-7 generation"

If you've been anywhere near a child this year, you've heard it. "Six seven! Six seven!" Hands bouncing up and down like they're weighing two invisible melons. It is, to them, the funniest thing ever said.

Here's what they don't know yet. Six a.m. to seven p.m. Six days out of seven. Until you're sixty-seven.

The joke's on them. And I honestly think that's why they can't stop saying it. Somewhere deep in the collective memory of the human race, call it morphic resonance if you like, they already know.

Four hours. Four phrases.

I teach ten-year-olds. I love every one of them, dearly. But today was the day I'd had enough.

A ten-year-old should be able to count to twelve and read a clock on the wall. We didn't even attempt the whole clock. Just four phrases. O'clock, quarter past, half past, quarter to. That's it.

I took the clock off the wall. I turned the hands. I drilled it. I explained it. I explained it again. One hour should have been plenty for ten-year-olds. It was four hours, and many still couldn't do it. To say they have the memory of a goldfish is an insult to the goldfish.

And it isn't just my classroom. An Opinium survey in the UK showed people three clock faces, one of them Big Ben. Only 77% of Gen Z read Big Ben correctly, against 92% of millennials.

Fluent in talking back

But talking back to me? Fluent. Native speakers. Nobody had to teach them that.

Mind you, don't call it arguing. A real argument has logic in it. A reason. A point. This is just noise with attitude.

Ten is the age of talking back. Give a ten-year-old a cookie and it's the wrong cookie. Give them the right cookie and they want two. That's the nature of the proverbial beast, and frankly, it's a big part of why parents send them to school. Somebody has to put up with it. That's what they pay us for, by and large. It obviously isn't to teach them to tell time.

And these ten-year-olds already know, the way they know their own names, that they are smarter than everyone older than them. Meanwhile, here's the kind of sentence I mark every week:

No capital letter at the start. No period at the end. Names in lowercase. "Good" spelled G-O-O-T. And "I don't know" has been replaced by "IDK," because everything is an acronym now.

I think a lot of this comes from turning school into a game. Points, badges, streaks, levels. It feels like learning, but much of the time it's babysitting with a scoreboard. The kids who really learn are the ones whose families can afford a private tutor. And by Jesus, those kids learn.

I love AI. Truly.

Let me be clear: I'm an AI-tinkering fanatic. I build websites with it. I use it every single day. It is thrilling to be alive right now and watch things that used to take months get done in an afternoon.

And this isn't even a story about AI ruining kids. I teach in Phnom Penh, where hardly anyone has the money for a monthly AI subscription, and the kids wouldn't know what to do with one if they did. The "we're smarter because of technology" attitude has arrived well before the technology has.

Here's what worries me. If you can't read, and you can't tell time, why would you ever learn to, when your phone can just talk to you and do it for you? I don't love the idea of a future where I'm lying in a hospital bed, depending on an AI and a doctor who can only tell time if the clock is digital.

But I'll meet the kids halfway. Maybe we really can drop some long division and a few multiplication drills. Fine. Then put the time into vocabulary. The more words you have, the better you can say exactly what you mean, and the better you can get an AI to do what you want. A prompt is only as good as the words in it.

That seems a lot wiser than arguing over whether an analog clock is "stupid."

Harder? Or simpler?

The kids on TikTok say the world is far more complicated now. I'm not so sure. I think it's about to get a whole lot simpler.

Pretty soon you'll just talk to your computer. "Make me a blog post," and it does, because you told it to. Do you know how much tedious hell I went through to learn all of this the hard way? And it's only going to get easier.

Here's my prediction: software will be the enemy, not what AI can create. The old war between "I use a PC" and "I use a Mac" is over. The new cult is which brand of AI you're into. I'll admit Claude has me hooked. It's expensive as hell, and yes, it's a cult. But I've always been the kind of person who gets into one pretty good.

So the kids are right that the world is changing. They're just wrong about which direction. The hard part won't be the technology. The hard part will be having something worth saying to it. And showing up on time. It won't be pretty when the 6-7 generation is late for their own wedding because nobody could read the clock in the church.

Never argue with a ten-year-old

Which brings me to the lesson I relearned today. When you find yourself arguing with a ten-year-old about what is and isn't stupid, it doesn't take long to work out who the stupid one in the argument is. Spoiler: it's the grown-up.

You don't argue with ten-year-olds. You give them boundaries. You give them consequences. It's as simple as that.

Are we turning into those old people? Well, yeah. We probably are. Cheers, my dears.

Anyway. It's quarter past "I'm done."

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— Ross Cline 柯受恩, rosscline.com